Service Level
Agreement components

Almost all corporations employ
a service level agreement (SLA) to ensure quality and codify customer
expectations.

Computer systems are very
scary to most corporate employees, and the majority of service level
agreements for computer applications spell-out very specific details
about availability, capacity, response time and technical support
services. Today's computer service providers are required to
sign-off on levels of quality for all system components.

There are formal service level
agreements for computer systems, delineating important operational factors such as
response time and system availability:

High Water Marks -
The system will be able to support up to 10,000 concurrent user requests.

Transaction Response
Time - 95% of all transactions will complete within one second, and no
single transaction may exceed 5 seconds.

System Availability - The system will be unavailable for less than 30 minutes per year.

System support -
All help desk requests will be addressed with 30 minutes by a vendor
certified person with good English communications skills.

Each of these SLA components
must be very specific, indicating how the SLA will be measured and what
penalties the provider must pay, should the SLA be violated.

Automating Service
Level Agreement compliance
monitoring

Your SLA is important and all
service level agreements should include details about the construction of an
automated mechanism to monitor compliance and report exceptions.

BC is a leader in
corporate service level agreements and we have experts to help you draft
SLA and install software to monitor compliance with any SLA.

These SLA software monitoring
solutions can be fully automated and
notify you and your provider whenever the exception thresholds of the SLA have
been exceeded. SLA compliance monitoring solutions can also be programmed
to escalate alerts, interfacing with pagers and telephones.

Service Level
Agreement for response time

The non-technical manager may
resist specific SLA conditions relating to response time claiming that is is
costly to measure end-to-end response time. In fact,
measuring response
time is easy, given the proper tools. Even internet response time can
be measured, and you can hire services to
conduct transactions around
the globe and report the end-to-end response time.

Service Level
Agreement for Availability

Today, the use of failover and
clustering technology allows computer system vendors to offer 99.9999%
guaranteed availability. Your computer support provider can buy
high-availability solutions such as Oracle Real Application Clusters for
ensure continuous availability.

Service Level
Agreement for support quality

Any SLA that addresses
technical support should be very specific about the quality of the technical
support personnel. Speaking of the ubiquitous help desk, SLA's for
technical support are often dismal. Companies sometime hire inmates from
prisons, mentally unstable people, and other marginally employable people,
anyone who will take constant abuse for $8/hour:

Always include communications skills
in your SLA

Since the
Internet now allows inexpensive electronic contact anywhere on the
globe, many companies are tempted to hire technical support from
third-world countries, where the person might not have an adequate
understanding of spoken English.

Remember, an SLA is not just about access
to a technician. It's also about requiring a certified (i.e. OCP,
MCDBA) technician with outstanding English communications skills.

This article 'Abroad
and Back' notes that customers who hear noticeable accents from help
desk personnel expect a bad experience, and they came to prefer
accent-neutral help desk support:

'"If customers called and heard an accent, they figured
it would be a bad experience," Griffiths said. "Even though there were
improvements over time, the [negative] perception was there." Three
months later, Griffiths knew he'd made a mistake.'

'Newspapers located near Dell's Austin,
Texas headquarters reported that customers were complaining not only about
having their calls answered by technical support staff who spoke with
accents but also about receiving scripted responses to their questions
rather than one-on-one support.'

The importance of
spoken communications

From a providers perspective,
the voice on the telephone is the voice of their corporation, and many
corporations go to great lengths to have accent-neutral voices (The accent of
northeast Ohio is the standard for television broadcast journalism).
Politicians take great pains to speak with accent neutral diction (JFK and Jimmy
Carter both had voice coaches).

In sum, all service level
agreements relating to computer systems should contain very specific provisions
and address method to monitor the service levels for the end-user community.

BC is a leader in
corporate service level agreements and we have experts to help you draft
SLA and install software to monitor compliance with any SLA.

��

Burleson is the American Team

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